Maybe, if the bovine experiments totally failed, she’d actually use them. Millions of lives hung in the balance. Rhumkorrf would probably even help. He was desperate to make it happen, desperate to make Jian stop being so stupid, such a failure.
So many people. People dying every day, dying because of her incompetence.
She needed to relax. Maybe Tim was right… maybe a little video game. Just for a few minutes. No one would know if she stopped working. Jian quietly turned to her left-lower monitor and called up the Chess Master program. So bad to play now! But she was stumped. Come on, Kasparov level, do your best.
She always beat the Kasparov level. At least the computer program was good enough to make her actually think about her moves, which was more than she could say of playing anyone else in the project. Poor P. J., always trying so hard to win, but he could only see five or six moves into the future. Jian saw entire games played out before the first pawn advanced.
She stared at the black-and-white pieces lined up neatly on the video chessboard. The computer waited for her to make the first move, but for some reason she could only stare at the pieces. The black pieces. The white pieces. Black and white.
Black and white.
Black and white.
They might be another color, and yet the game would still be the same. Blue and red, yellow and purple, and that wouldn’t make any difference because the board’s function didn’t change.
The board that lay underneath the black-and-white pieces. Black and white…
… like the fur on the cows.
“That’s it,” she whispered. “That’s it!”
She quit the chess program and called up the bovine genome, her fingers an unrecognizable blur on the keyboard. It was so obvious. Why hadn’t she thought of this before? If all that mattered was the internal organs, the underneath, she could eliminate hundreds of potentially problematic genes by swapping out what was on top—the integument.
The God Machine could process that change even while counting off the genomes of the four extinct mammals. Could all of it be enough to push the viability rating over 80 percent?
Her main terminal let out an alarm beep, demanding her attention. She called up the alarm window.
REMOTE BACKUP FAILURE
The off-site backup, the ten-petabyte data drive array that sat in a temperature-controlled brick building at the end of the runway… it had failed. That system hadn’t failed once in the fourteen months since they’d installed it. The array was designed to survive no matter what, to keep the experiment alive in the event of worst-case scenarios at the main facility. Computer crashes, fire, electromagnetic pulses… she’d been told it could even survive a really big explosive called a fuel-bomb, although she couldn’t imagine why someone would use such a destructive thing on a harmless research facility.
The timing couldn’t be worse. She had inspiration, the missing link that might let her solve the immune reaction problem. But she highly doubted the backup drive failure was an accident—someone was up to something. She’d just have to do two things at once: deal with the backup failure, and simultaneously type in the genetic code that had hit her like a blast of mountain wind. She isolated the computer lab from the rest of the network, then quickly called up a diagnostics program.
NOVEMBER 8: MRS. SANSOME
Margarite’s hands moved of their own accord, as if possessed by an unseen demon of passion. She undid the laces on her bodice, slowly exposing her soft, moon-shaped breasts. When the night air caressed her nipples she gasped… how could she be so bold?
“Yes, Mrs. Sansome,” Craig beckoned heatedly. “Yes, let me see.”
“I will, Craig,” she cooed sexually.
She stared at him, her eyes passionately out of focus. She wanted him. But he was a vampire! And a stable boy vampire at that!! She had come so far from her servant beginnings, winning the hand of Edward and becoming Mrs. Edward Sansome the Duchess of Tethshire and a very rich woman with money and jewels and many servants of her own. This was wrong, was it not? This was evil! She had to run! Run to Pastor Johnson and do something or she would become an evil denizen of the night and seek the blood of innocents.
However, before she could turn and run, Craig stood up and effortlessly declothed himself of his trousers. His penis sparkled in the moonlight like skin made of crushed rubies.
GUNTHER JONES SAT back and read his words. Not bad, if he did say so himself. Take a bite out of that, Stephenie Meyer. How hard could it be? Some handsome bloodsuckers, some romance, a little forbidden fruit that turns into hot sex, and boom—vampire novel.
The wee hours of the morning were usually his most creative. Tucked away in the security control room, no one bothered him, particularly at 3:00 A.M. Not that he didn’t do his job… there just wasn’t much job to do. Other than making sure Jian didn’t try to off herself, he ran through all scheduled procedures and checked that the alarm systems were online. If anything came up that required eyeballs, he woke Brady or Andy or Colding, depending on who was on call.
Closed-circuit cameras blanketed the facility’s interior, giving him a view of every possible angle. After almost two years here, he was adept at keeping the monitors in his peripheral vision—if something out there moved, he’d see it. Nothing ever did. That meant Gunther Jones basically got paid damn good money to sit and write for hours on end.
He’d completed two novels in the Hot Dusk series already: Hot Dusk and Hot Evening. As soon as he finished his current book, Hot Midnight, he’d have a kick-ass trilogy to push on agents.
The computer beeped, indicating an alert. Gunther reduced his novel (making sure to save it first, he wasn’t about to lose those amazing words), revealing a flashing alert message:
SATELLITE UPLINK SIGNAL DOWN
He called up the maintenance screen, hit the re-link button, then waited to see the link reconnect like it always did. Colding didn’t like losing that signal, although it happened from time to time for some interstellar communications reason they didn’t really understand. A new message appeared:
NO SIGNAL DETECTED, RE-LINK FAILURE
Huh. He’d never seen that before. He repeated the step and waited.
NO SIGNAL DETECTED, RE-LINK FAILURE
“Colding’s going to be pissed.” Gunther called up the diagnostics program and let it run.
HARDWARE FAILURE
He stared at the screen. Hardware failure? That had never happened before. There was only one thing left to do in the repair protocol—send out some eyeballs. He turned to the vid-phone and punched Brady’s room.
NOVEMBER 8: A HOT TIME IN THE OLD TOWN
BRADY GIOVANNI DIDN’T mind the cold, but that didn’t mean he was stupid about it. He had been one of those kids who always listened to his mother. Growing up in Saskatoon, listening to your mother meant dressing warm.
When on call, dressing warm meant wearing his thermal long johns and socks to bed, cutting down his response time. After Gunther’s call woke him, it took Brady only seconds to pull on the black Genada parka with matching snow pants, military-grade cold-weather gloves, a scarf and the thing that Andy “The Asshole” Crosthwaite teased him about to no end—a wool hat knitted by none other than Brady’s mother. The hat fit perfectly over his big head and the headset/mic combo in his ear.